Requiem
by Cygna-hime
Summary: I loved him. I still love him." Sometimes love is not enough. Sometimes nothing is enough. Sometimes people forget what they ought to remember. And sometimes what people remember isn't what they should know. [slash MerrimanHawkin]


**Okay, so I have a bit of a bee in my bonnet about this pairing. Someone has to! Besides, omgtheirloveissocanonicallyangsty! Yes, I am insane. No, this does not make life difficult for me. Quite the contrary.**

**Disclaimer: No matter how well I know the poetry backwards and forwards, or how many people I sacrifice to the characters, The Dark is Rising does not belong to me. Pout. Although, if anyone's selling I'll put in a bid for Hawkin...loves**

**Warning: Slash, of the Merriman/Hawkin variety. Yes, again. Shut it. Also, SPOILERIFIC for DiR itself. Hahahahaaa. And angst. With the duh.**

Requiem

I loved him. I still love him.

I am forgotten. Of all the tales, of all the songs, none remember me. It is better so. I do not want to be remembered for what I did. I want to be remembered instead for who I was, for whom I loved, for who, perhaps, loved me. And that only he can remember now.

I must have loved him from the first moment I set eyes upon him. I was a child, no more, and he...was very much as he has ever been. Of course, I didn't know that then. I didn't even know I loved him, although I must have done, for I cannot remember a time when his smiles, his assurances meant no more to me than another's. He was always, always the most important. He was my liege-lord, the man who took care of me as a son...but I was not his son. No wife or mistress of his bore me. I was glad, am still glad, for that. I wondered once why it was he, and not my kin, who raised me. I still wonder. Did he know what he would come to be to me? Did he even suspect that he would have in me a more devoted pawn than he could otherwise have gotten? I should not think so bitterly of him. Perhaps not even an Old One, not even he can predict the human soul. I would like to believe so.

I grew, and grew to love him ever more in those years in his manor, until I marveled that he could not tell from the barest glance at my face. Maybe he could, and simply chose to be silent for a reason of his own. At that time, I could not imagine how he could be unaware that I worshipped him not as a son, but as a lover. And then he did. No more than a look and a smile passed from him to me, but I knew, or thought I knew, that I was the most important to him as he will always be the most important to me.

He told me, that day. About everything. About the Light, the Dark, the Old Ones...himself. I had always known him to be far older than I, but so much older, so much that age had no meaning-! He looked at me when he explained, trying to gauge my reaction before I spoke. I laughed. After all, I had not minded before; why should I? I told him I loved him, then, for the first time, and in the warmth of the first kiss we shared he said he loved me too.

I would have done anything for him, in those blissful days and weeks when the world was perfect. I wanted to do something for him, anything, everything. I wanted to give him everything. It frightened me then, frightens me even now, that I could, and did, and can, and do want anything so much. So when he told me what he wanted me to do, I was more than willing to help. I would have done anything he asked.

Coming forward in time was wonderful. Almost, but not quite, I forgot why I had come. I didn't care, or thought I didn't, that my liege-lord left to fetch another Old One, a boy not yet grown into his strength, the boy I had to help do that growing. I liked the boy. He was young, very much a child still, knowing not even so much as I did about what he was. He reminded me of myself, or of the younger brother I never had. I wanted to do what I could to guide and protect him for his own sake, and not just because my lord had asked it of me.

I was not prepared for what I did do. I don't think anyone could ever have been prepared. To kneel there, watching death swing back and forth, knowing everything rests on the graceful movement of his fingers, and yet unable to do so much as gasp...no one could make themselves ready for that. I never feared death in battle or illness, but to remain still and calm while wondering if I would live another second was unlike anything I had imagined. And my lord...all I could think of as I watched was that if I were to die I would not be able to say goodbye to him. But as it happened, I did not die.

And then I more than died to see that my lord cared less for my life than for the boy and the book he held, the book for which I had risked my life. It was as though a fog melted from my sight. He cared nothing for me; he never had cared. I had been no more than a willing tool, to be spoken to kindly perhaps, but not wanted after its use had been fulfilled. My love had been nothing, my life even less. What could a man who would live perhaps forty years matter to an immortal? And the boy...I truly had seen in him an echo of myself; young (but an Old One, too, and immortal), looking to my lord for guidance, simple and childish as yet. But of a sudden I realized he would grow very quickly, and what was a dozen years to an Old One? So I thought then. I have learned better now. But then I wanted to hurt all of them, him with his concern, and the Old Ones with their pity, and my lord most of all, with his betrayal. That was the way it felt.

I could hurt them. A way was open before me. The Dark girl thought she could persuade me to join her; she was a fool. I cared nothing then for her or her masters, only for what I could do to their enemies. I let them in, and then...I was struck down, everything that I had been destroyed for the second time by the man I loved. He took away the chance I was seeking even then, death and forgetfulness at the hands of the Dark, or of the Light, or if all else failed, myself. He had taken my life from me, and without any more hesitation than he had shown in doing that he took away my death. I hated him then, for destroying all that had been me and yet refusing to destroy me. And still I loved him. I loved him through all the years I carried the Sign, loved him and hated him and feared him too, until it was all I could do to release the Sign at all. It had been my safeguard, my protection from who I once had been. But how could I not give it up? I knew I had, I had seen it on his belt. So it was done.

I wanted to turn back, when he asked me. I wanted it so much it hurt. But I was so sure he was lying, pretending affection if that would protect him and his from the Dark. He had done it before, or I thought he had. Even though I was certain it was nought but pretense, almost I went to him and begged forgiveness. I wanted what he was offering, to be what I had been, wanted it so much. But then I realized: I could never be what I had been. He had stripped all that away. Home? I had no home, had never had a home except with him, and I was no longer wanted there. Trust? Love? They had passed from me to him in a flood, leaving me empty without his to fill me. So I refused him and his Light. The Dark, at least, made no pretense of asking or giving trust.

I was a fool, and worse than a fool. I know that now. I first knew when I fell, at last, from the horse of the Black Rider. I had been expecting it, but still it hurt in a faint shadow of that first pain. But the Dark had nothing of me to betray. The pain I had been awaiting, but not the terrible, clinging numbness. Less had I lookd for the figures who came to me; my lord, and the boy beside him who I could at last see was not a reflection or replacement, but himself. My lord...he told me, then, all I had thought was wrong. I had been a fool to make myself believe that it was his doing, not mine, that parted us. That much was past. He had forgiven me; it was more than I had ever hoped for. For what I had done to him, or tried to do, I deserved far worse than I had suffered, and yet he forgave me. I loved him, in that last moment when speech was gone, more than I had ever loved him before. I hope he understood then what I had no longer the voice to say, for I can not now see him to tell him what is in my heart.

I loved him. I still love him.

* * *

**...And I love Hawkin oh-so-much, because he is cool. Love.**

**'Requiem' is defined as 'song for the dead'. Seemed appropriate.**

**Feedback=happy Cygna=productive Cygna=more fic. Math is good!**


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